The Port of Philadelphia, 1750.
Good morning, readers. I’ve returned from a grant-supported trip to Sweden, and it was everything I’d hoped for. I may well write about that in the near future, as well, as it has everything to do with my developing career as an artist.
Today I’m continuing on a thread that astounded me when I first learned of it: the fact that at least one of my ancestors was, in all likelihood, an indentured servant—what the Germans called a “redemptioner.” Or, as Gottlieb Mittelberger called them in his 1756 book, Journey to Pennsylvania, “serfs” or “slaves.”
In my last post, I talked about how such servitude came about, and coupled with past posts about the wars of King Louis the XIV in the Palatinate region of Germany (then the Holy Roman Empire), it comes down to simply this: poverty, enflamed by the scorched-earth campaigns of the French king when he invaded that corner of Germany, drove people abroad. A ruined economy, with villages and fields burned to ashes, and a historic winter that further exacerbated the problems, forced peasants to flee for, especially, Pennsylvania, where many of their countrymen had already settled.
But what really drove the exodus, according to Mittelberger, were the human traffickers, the newlanders. Today, we’ll look at them a bit closer, drawing on Mittelberger’s writing, which itself draws on his own experience.
The “newlanders” were essentially agents. They went among the peasants of Germany with great promises of wealth and land in the New World. The newlander would go to Germany, “pretending that he had come from Pennsylvania with the intention of purchasing all sorts of merchandise which he was going to take there.” They claim to have gotten power-of-attorney from some of the villager’s fellow countrymen that had settled in Pennsylvania—or from some other authority there—“to obtain legacies or inheritances” and that these very villagers could avail themselves of the windfall.
The agents would flash money, gold watches, expensive clothes, saying that they had made their fortune in the colonies. They would attempt to fool anyone: “soldiers, scholars, artists and mechanics” and even nobles, men and women of rank, learned peoples.
Mittelberger says that merchants in Holland, in league with the ship captains and the newlanders, would make secret contracts taking the Germans to entirely different places than they thought they were going, if they thought there were a better market for the bodies. “Thus emigrants are compelled in Holland to submit to the wind and to the captain's will, because they cannot know at sea where the ship is steered to. But all this is the fault of the newlanders and of some unscrupulous dealers in human flesh in Holland.”
When the poor peasants entrust their money to the newlanders, those same newlanders would stay behind in Holland—with the money. If relatives in the New World write letters warning of the impending servitude, the newlanders, Mittelberger claims, will have the letters opened and either destroy or rewrite them. There were, apparently, expert counterfeiters and forgers for hire in Holland.
Mittelberger relays a story where he himself was nearly deceived when, having at last decided to return home, these merchants nearly convinced him that his own wife and child had already embarked on a ship for Philadelphia, all the while describing them so thoroughly that Mittelberger was “exceedingly confused and irresolute.” The merchants even presented “witnesses” to their fanciful story—“seducers of the people,” he called them.
“The merchants no doubt thought that, if I returned home,” Mittelberger writes, “I should reveal their whole nefarious traffic and the deplorable condition of the numerous families that emigrated and rushed into their ruin, and that I should thereby cause great damage to their shipping interests and their traffic in human flesh.”
This “redemptioner” system, which replaced the older indentured servitude system beginning in the 1720’s, wouldn’t end until the early 1800’s. In an issue of the Yearbook of German American Studies from 2019, author James D. Boyd points out that legislation changed these practices in June of 1817. A new Dutch law required that the emigrants have a contract already in hand, and an additional Prussian law denied the Germans passage through the Prussian territory without passports and cash in hand. These new laws halved arrivals in Dutch territories, and ships leaving Holland consequently dwindled. The numbers of emigrants that declined most were those from Baden and Württemberg.
Demand for labor in Pennsylvania also began to slow in 1818, when the American economy entered a recession. Still, sales of redemptioners were pushed further to other states—even as far as Alabama—where what was called “soul driving” became common, with scores of labor contracts for redemptioners bought at the harbors and the souls driven further inland to be sold at higher prices. Other states that began to absorb German redemptioners included New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia.
U.S. laws further made it more difficult for the profit from redemptioners. An act of 1819 was legislation “designed to improve sanitary conditions and limit abuses of arriving migrants.” Whatever incentives there were to carry redemptioners over the ocean became instead risks.
Example of an indenture, 1760
As for “the traffic of human souls,” Mittelberger has this to add:
“I only add that in purchasing these people no one asks for references as to good character or an honorable discharge. If any one had escaped the gallows, and had the rope still dangling around his neck, or if he had left both his ears in Europe, nothing would be put in his way in Pennsylvania. But if he is again caught in wrong-doing, he is hopelessly lost. For gallows' birds and wheel candidates, Pennsylvania is, therefore, a desirable land.”